The City of Seattle spends a big portion of its overall budget—about $900 million annually—on purchasing goods and services. While Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) account for nearly 38 percent of the city’s population, BIPOC-owned businesses earn only 14 percent of the City’s purchasing and contracting spend.

This is why Seattle is leading the way to transform our procurement process to be results-driven, accessible, and equitable. Seattle is one of two cities in the United States to be awarded a $1 million, two-year grant by the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation to help transform its approach to buying. The Bloomberg Procurement Transformation project is a partnership between the Seattle Finance and Administrative Services Department (FAS), the Innovation and Performance Team, and the Harvard Government Performance Lab. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell also recently introduced a new Executive Order that expands contracting equity and access for businesses, particularly WMBEs, seeking contracting and procurement opportunities with the City of Seattle. Through the new Executive Order, City departments will implement key actions that advance contracting equity and support women and BIPOC-owned firms that are disproportionally underutilized in public contracting opportunities.  

Read more on the City Innovation Hub blog.

Last month, Innovation & Performance and Seattle Information Technology staff participated in two international conferences to share innovative solutions and best practices across governments.

First, Service Design Project Lead Long Dinh traveled to Ottawa, CA to present at the FWD50 Conference, an annual gathering for public sector innovation. Long shared his experience leading the Seattle By Design Cohort alongside co-presenter Stig Parfrey from U.S. Digital Response (USDR).

In their presentation, Long and Stig shared the benefits of the cohort model for user research, including how it created a community of practice and enabled teams to share knowledge and resources. As Long and Stig shared, user research has the potential to make a huge impact in government: the recommendations that came out of the Seattle By Design project are expected to make a difference for thousands of City of Seattle residents.

Next, Seattle staff presented at FormFest, a virtual event showcasing governments that are working to make services accessible to everyone through online forms. The conference attracted public service enthusiasts from across the world, including Seattle’s own Elise Kalstad and Miguel Jimenez, who shared their experience working on Affordable Seattle.

In their presentation, “Forms on the fly: Low and no code tools used by Seattle, WA,” Elise and Miguel shared how Seattle is using an open source tool to make it easier for residents to apply for multiple benefits at once. Their presentation highlighted how Seattle uses universal questions to streamline the application process for many services.

You can sign-up here to receive an alert when the FormFest conference recordings are available on YouTube: sign up to be notified.

This fall, Innovation & Performance released a report reviewing the impact of several years of Seattle's Technology Matching Fund grants, based on four years of narrative reports from community partners.

Seattle is a highly connected city overall, but digital access is not equitably distributed. In 2020, 21% of households with incomes under $25,000 lived without internet access at home. Seattle Information Technology's Technology Matching Fund has awarded over $7 million to community partners since the program began in 1998 to help close the digital divide.

The new report suggests that Technology Matching Fund programs are making a real difference to get Seattle residents connected with internet and the skills they need to use it. This helps communities be able to fully participate in culture and civic life, advance their careers and education, and access essential services.

The report also found common challenges partners face and strategies to address those challenges. These best practices have been shared with the 2023 Technology Matching Fund cohort to learn from the experience of past grantees.

Read the Technology Matching Fund 2018-2021 Qualitative Review, and visit the Technology Matching Fund website to learn more about the program.

Last month, Qualtrics and Innovation & Performance hosted a free, two-day workshop on Human Centered Design for City of Seattle staff at their downtown Seattle headquarters. This was an immersive opportunity for City staff to learn and practice Human Centered Design principles so that we can better design and deliver City services, create stronger policies, and drive more equitable outcomes for residents.

The workshop introduced participants to the Human Centered Design framework and its value for government organizations. Participants learned and practiced methods and tools that help teams listen, understand, and act on human experiences.

Staff from across the City participated in the workshop, including staff from the Office of Economic Development, Seattle Information Technology, the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, and more.

Seattle Parks activations bring together communities most impacted by COVID-19

Governor Inslee’s Stay Home, Stay Healthy order in 2020 paused most in-person recreation programs as a measure to help contain the spread of the deadly virus. As it became safer for people to gather in-person, the City of Seattle invested federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to activate our public parks and make them safe and inviting for everyone’s use. In 2022, Seattle Parks and Recreation partnered with 30 community groups to host 37 activation events and interventions. These activities served a total of about 78,000 attendees.

Activations were spread across the city, with an emphasis on parks located in historically underserved neighborhoods. Out of the 78,000 logged participants across these activations, 98% of them were attending events that were held in areas with the first or second highest equity priority level, according to Seattle’s Race and Social Equity Index.

Read more: Performance Spotlight on Seattle Parks Activations